The attached shareholder proposal for ConocoPhillips demonstrates a methodology that other people should consider to expose corrupt politicians and the corporate executives who support them.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) groped for justification of its bloated budget. The CIA found that elected officials were willing to continue the flow of money to the obsolete �intelligence� organ (for �work� that was largely unsupervised by the US Congress) if the CIA cooperated with the politicians largest campaign contributors -- large multinational corporations. The most cooperative candidates were the large multinational petroleum companies and telecommunications corporations because many of the executives with these corporations had access to high-level government officials in states where the academics and/or former military hired-killers that populated the CIA could not operate � such as Iran, Libya, Somalia, Nigeria, Angola, etc.

Subsequently, the perverse situation developed where in public politicians would articulate US foreign policy that demand no US corporations should engage in business in a state like Libya or Iran, however in secret, these same politicians would direct �rogue� elements (one always needs to have a �plausible denial� defense to fall back upon) within the CIA and the CIA subsidiary, the Department of State, to turn a blind-eye to the activities of certain preferred US corporations, like ConocoPhillips.

The CIA bureaucrats got their blotted budgets and the intelligence that tax payers paid to get was obtained at the expense of the shareholders (pension funds, etc.) of the �chosen� corporations. As quid pro quo, the chosen corporations� executives gained immunity from prosecution for their illegal business dealings with high-level government officials of the putative rogue state who, starved for business relations with the rest of the world by the US imposed sanctions, are forced to take whatever deal the chosen corporation offers. Sadly, the average citizen of the putative rogue state making the deals with the chosen corporation have a better understanding of the politics of the scam than do most so-called �journalist� in the US.

Recently, the illegal recording of conversations and email correspondence between US citizens within the United States by telecommunications corporations has been in the news. The Bush-Cheney Administration has attempted to quickly push through legislation that will retroactively grant immunity from civil law suits against the telecommunications corporations who were complicit in these privacy violations against persons known only to the telecommunications corporations (defendants) and the US government bureaucrats who directed the illegal eavesdropping operation.

The attached shareholder proposal shows another avenue of attack against rogue corporations like these telecommunications corporations and ConocoPhillips. Both the eavesdropping telecommunications corporations and ConocoPhillips have engaged in activities that waste shareholder resources in carrying out activities that are outside of the corporations� charters as public companies and that also expose the corporations to enormous civil liabilities. When these activities are discovered by investors at large the companies� share price decreases, sometimes dramatically as in the case of Enron. Shareholders have a right to information regarding material changes in the business dealings of their corporation � it is fraud for a public corporation�s board of directors to secretly change the corporation�s charter and not tell shareholder.

As demonstrated by the ConocoPhillips response to the attached shareholder proposal uncovering this kind of fraud faces a great deal or resistance by the antibodies (lawyers) of the corporate immune system who have spent a lot of (shareholder) money on outside lawyers to suppress the proposal from shareholder consideration. The corporation�s in-house and out-house lawyers will undoubtedly use their substantial influence with the lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (many of whom do the SEC work to build credentials for very lucrative lawyer-jobs in the private sector) to quash publication in the ConocoPhillips proxy material on or about March 31, 2008. However, if enough shareholders find out about the issue and call or write to the SEC, the issue has a chance of getting on the agenda for Annual Meeting of Shareholders on May 14, 2008.